Gratitude is for adults

Agnieszka Jucewicz: “Want to be happy? Be grateful” – we have recently been hearing from various authorities dealing with so-called self-development, but also psychology. The “practice of gratitude” seems to be a new panacea for the ailments of modern man.

Agnieszka Iwaszkiewicz: What is it all about then?

For example, about keeping a “gratitude journal”. It’s enough just to write down a few things for which we feel grateful before going to bed. It doesn’t have to be anything big, “a healthy and tasty breakfast”, but also “criticism from my boss, which proved to be a useful lesson” (this is a quote from one of the most popular coaches in Poland). It’s about appreciating the little things. This will increase our sense of happiness by up to 25%, according to the well-known researcher of gratitude, Professor Robert Emmons of the University of California.

Feeling, expressing and accepting gratitude is undoubtedly pleasant and necessary in everyday life. But gratitude isn’t always easy. It’s a complex feeling that requires maturity. To feel genuine gratitude, it’s not enough to melt in delight over a steaming cup of tea. It’s a process that takes quite a long time to develop inside a person. In contrast, orders such as, “Now appreciate what you’ve got”, seems to me to be extortion, not necessarily consistent with what you’re going through right now. You can feel momentary pleasure, feel comfortable, but is that gratitude? It’s scary to think what it would be like if, summing up my day, I didn’t find one thing to be grateful for. Would that mean there’s something wrong with me?

That would mean you still have to practice.

Exactly, and that’s what strikes me as some kind of “gratitude terrorism”. It needlessly infantilises something that’s not infantile at all.

Gratitude primarily takes place in a relationship. I know that some people want to be grateful to themselves – for having done something, for having surmounted something. One can also feel gratitude for simply living or being in a beautiful place, while the main role of gratitude is creating bonds. It’s a social opportunity to provide good, an opportunity for an important exchange.

Cicero called it the mother of all other virtues.

And the well-known philosopher Adam Smith believed that it was an emotion that maintains balance in a society.

And this genuine, bond-creating gratitude, contrary to what you said at the beginning, I see very little of today.

Did there use to be more of it?

I think it used to come more easily because we lived more socially. It was natural, because people just needed each other more. They were unable to provide everything for themselves – shelter, food, childcare. You couldn’t just go out and buy it. We needed cooperation and the help of others.

Today, we prefer to think that everything is in our hands, so if we are to be grateful to someone, it is primarily to ourselves. We live with a sense of omnipotence, “I don’t need anyone to have a happy life”, “I overcome life’s obstacles on my own”, “I never ask for help”, etc. In this context, genuine gratitude appears to be a weakness. If not outright lameness.

Has it gone that far?

Because it shows that we need others, that we are dependent, that someone gives us something that we cannot provide ourselves. Whether on a material, mental or emotional level. Gratitude makes us realise that we are not self-sufficient at all. Until you come to terms with it, it’s hard to feel grateful.

What else can stand in the way of gratitude?i?

Reluctance to confront one’s own deficiency, for instance. Someone’s giving me something I don’t have. If this deficiency is severe and additionally involves some painful experience, gratitude cannot occur. In its place, there appears the desire to appropriate this good, “They didn’t really give it to me because I already have it all.”

Let’s consider care, for instance. If, during childhood, someone didn’t receive it in the right moment, in the appropriate form or quantity, or received it conditionally, for meeting expectations, then such a person will never want to feel the same way again – that they need it, but don’t get it. And that’s how they arrange their lives, so that they don’t have to direct the need for care or closeness towards others any more. They don’t need it, so they don’t owe it to anyone.

There are also people who think they don’t deserve what they get. Is it harder for them to feel grateful too?

This is another aspect of what we are talking about now, which is confrontation with a lack of something. Such a person, when they get something they don’t have, can feel exposed and then they treat this gift as something harmful. This could be a simple invitation to a party for a lonely person who is ashamed of it, for instance. Gratitude in such cases is a reminder that one is poor in some trait, skill, or some other important thing, so it’s better not to let it come to you and refuse the invitation with a sense of superiority. With restraint and dignity.

The opposite is a situation in which we feel that everything is thanks to us, so why be thankful?

And this, unfortunately, is a sign of our times. Today, we often think that we have to arrange our lives in such a way that our expectations are met and we are happy. Work, relationships, and the environment in which we operate are supposed to satisfy us, not frustrate us. What’s more, it must be achieved without any special effort. We discussed this in our previous conversation about the terror of happiness. A demanding attitude removes gratitude from life.

I also think that nowadays, gratitude can be difficult because it can give the feeling of holding someone back.

In this march for even better and even more? Yes, this happens, too. There’s a fear that if I allowed myself to feel such genuine gratitude for how and thanks to whom my life worked out, it would be like saying to myself, “All right! That’s enough! I’m satisfied. I don’t need anything more.” As if I no longer had any challenges. And this kind of thinking seems embarrassing today. After all, it’s not enough for me, and I can afford to be thankful, provided that I treat it as another gadget – like keeping a gratitude journal – and not as something that comes from my inner world and is the result of overcoming my own emotional limitations – some kind of blockage or restraint. Sometimes the problem with gratitude is that you feel it, but you can’t show it, because it seems embarrassing. Then we react to a gesture addressed to us with indifference or disregard.

But sometimes we don’t allow ourselves to be thankful, because we prefer to harbour a grudge against the person who gives or has given us something of value, and to maintain the negative feelings we have for them. That’s how we’re stuck with the feeling of hurt.

What for?

For some, such a position is very nourishing and gratifying. If they let gratitude in, they’d have to give up the position of the victim, which is simply safe for them.

When you say that, I think of grown up children who explain all their failures in life with their “nightmare” childhoods, even though they’re already 40 or 50 years old. And yet there are probably some things to be grateful to these parents for, besides what is hard to forgive.

This may be the most important thing about gratitude – the ability to endure ambivalence, that is, that the same person can be both good and bad. They take something from us, but they also give us something. You have to be able to see it and to associate it. This ability, exercised many times in relation to different people and at different stages of life, is a sign of maturity.

But to be fair, it’s difficult to feel grateful to parents who have been physically or mentally abusive or have neglected us, even though it’s probably possible... In such drastic cases, I’d rather think about the fact that you can feel grateful to yourself, that you’ve been able to turn those terrible experiences into something creative and that today, thanks to them, you’re more sensitive to human harm or more attentive to your own children.

However, in cases not quite so dramatic, it can be considered that although parents, for example, didn’t offer much praise or were more likely to reprimand, which caused some of our life’s problems today, were, on the other hand, witty, caring and allowed to bring home whatever dogs, cats or turtles we happened to pick up. And that’s something you can be thankful for.

However, there are people who are unable to tolerate this ambivalence either at all or periodically. They can’t come up with what, in psychological language, is called a “good enough parent” with an emphasis on the word “enough”. The kind that supports, but sometimes frustrates and messes up. Some people can’t see their parents in this light. They only see them as perfect or as bad. In such a case gratitude cannot exist.

The problem also lies in the fact that once I admit the thought of gratitude to myself, there is a motive for reciprocity.

And I don’t necessarily need to feel like giving something back... Is that what you wanted to ask me about?

Yes. Because, for example, this is a person who once hurt me.

It doesn’t have to go that far. It’s enough that we don’t value someone or like them. Just like that. And if we get something important from such a person, we may feel compelled to gratitude and reciprocity, which we don’t want, even though we know that we should return the favour. Such gratitude becomes a duty, a millstone around the neck. It strains our image of ourselves: “What do you mean? Me? I’m such a good person, and I’m incapable of doing such a thing?”

And what are we to do about it?

It’s all about boundaries. There are situations in which we have the right not to feel grateful at all. Maturity is not about feeling grateful to everyone for everything, for the sun rising and for our parents giving birth to us. We may feel that someone doesn’t deserve our gratitude just because they made one kind gesture, but before that, they were deliberately annoying us all day. Or because the good they give isn’t a sincere gift, but mere manipulation. For example, they’re offering to help us in exchange for absolute submission.

Then we hear how ungrateful we are.

But in such cases, ingratitude is a sign of maturity. It means that we are keeping our feelings in check, that they are a compass that guides us. We don’t deny that we don’t like someone or that we’re angry with them or that we feel used for someone else’s game.

Can gratitude be learned?

Maybe you can learn to show it, but can you learn how to feel it? That’s what I have a problem with. I’d be more likely to say, although I don’t like the word, that you can open up to it, for example in therapy, when you touch some previously unused areas or reduce mental tension in others, which makes it a relief for which you can be grateful... On the other hand, I have limited confidence in science understood as the practice of gratitude that you mentioned. Does this result in a real transformation, or is it just an external form? Does such gratitude trigger any further mental process, e.g. allow to get rid of some burden that has been carried around for years? Overcome one’s internal inhibitions? Get closer to someone? I doubt it.

What else besides therapy can open us up to gratitude?

Different life experiences that make us humble, thanks to which we learn to appreciate. We may be a very mature person, but certain life experiences temper this maturity: childbirth, death of loved ones, dramatic breakups, illness. I think that’s the real science of gratitude. As a result of various, most often difficult, life experiences, a person softens and accepts opportunities that once seemed impossible to them, for example, that they can ask others for help and accept it. When this gratitude is in harmony with us and sincere, then it can really be liberating.

I understand the condition is for it to be honest, not forced, “Feel grateful that your husband betrayed you”, because these are “lessons that will help you learn more about yourself”. Again, quotes from various pieces of self-development advice.

Sometimes we say, “I’m grateful I got fired because a year later I found a better job.” It’s just that, first of all, it’s usually actually said a year or two later, and secondly, I don’t know if the word “gratitude” is appropriate here. Doesn’t that fit the definition of relief or satisfaction rather than gratitude? Besides, in our culture, the word “gratitude” is often used to describe a completely different process. A kind of emotional blackmail. Something called a double bind in psychology, “I’ll give you something, even if you don’t want it, and you have to be grateful for it.” Or, “You have to be grateful because of your position in the family or in society.”

Because you’re a child, for example.

Or an old man or a poor man who should be grateful to his benefactor. Because that’s the hierarchy. “I’ve been so busy making your favourite dishes, and you don’t want to come to Christmas Dinner, you just want to spend it with your girlfriend,” says a mother to her adult son. An incriminating charge such as, “You’re ungrateful” is made. Ingratitude here is the desire to live one’s own life. The recipient rightly feels that this “gift” is not for them at all, but that it’s a kind of emotional corruption, forced gratitude, which has nothing to do with the real one.

It’s not easy getting out of this.

Often in such situations there is a sense of guilt, “I am ungrateful, my mother cared so much, neglected her own pleasures.” We feel a profound shame that we cannot, and yet we should show gratitude, which persecutes and oppresses. And in actual fact we’re just being blackmailed.

You can also try to act out that gratitude. After all, why not?

Put on a show of gratitude? You can. Mum will be happy, I’ll come back home, I’ll swear, I’ll flip out, I’ll say that I’ll never allow myself to be manipulated into such a thing as Christmas or a birthday, or whatever else, ever again. It’s relatively easy to rinse off. On the other hand, because of such a strong sense of guilt that “I am bad”, “I hurt someone”, “I made someone unhappy”, and someone meant well after all, it’s not actually that easy.

What would be the point of the person forcing gratitude?

A sense of importance. The feeling that you’re still relevant. Control.

But that someone knows it’s forced gratitude, right?

Not necessarily. There’s also the motive of compensating for the effort. If someone tired themselves out and hears, “I don’t need it at all, I never did,” then how do you get out of this situation? You have to force gratitude, because only gratitude is able to heal this unnecessary effort, this masochistic piece that forced you to dedicate your time. Everyone told me not to make 12 dishes for Christmas this year, to share the work, but I didn’t want to. And now, instead of taking responsibility for that decision, I prefer to force gratitude on others, because it’s supposed to bring me relief from the feeling of failure or loss.

It seems to me that in previous generations, parent-children relationships were often burdened with this forced gratitude.

Yes, I agree. And now I am delighted to be able to observe subsequent generations, for example, of 20-30-year-olds who have a very good contact with their parents and enjoy spending time with them. By choice, not by compulsion. They want to give and they can take, precisely because no one has persistently blackmailed them with this gratitude.

In my generation or yours, children had to be grateful for something all the time, while parents rarely felt grateful to their children. These days it’s changing, I think.

Because today, more and more often parents can see that they can also have fun being parents, they can appreciate how much they learn from their children. After all, children make us grow and withdraw from some of our misguided ideas. Thanks to them, we try to control too far-reaching and appropriating desires.

Why was it harder for previous generations to see this?

Because a child was viewed differently. They weren’t a little person, they were someone with no qualities who doesn’t have any potential yet. It was only the parent who moulded them, and the child was to be grateful for this moulding, for all these sacrifices, for being fed, dressed, educated, well brought up. Parenthood meant power.

You don’t think that way about kids any more. They are given an identity from birth. You care about their experiences, needs and rights, although of course this doesn’t mean that today’s parents don’t fall into various traps at the meeting point of parenthood and gratitude.

Sometimes I hear from previous generations that today children are ungrateful because they aren’t taught to thank. They’re no longer told, “Well, come on, thank Grandma for dinner”, “Thank Granddad for coming. He came especially for you”.

Do children really have to be grateful for being looked after by adults? For receiving dinner? For someone playing with them? Adults are meant to take care of children and to raise them. I don’t consider it reasonable to ask them to be grateful for the fact that adults are carrying out their duties. In any case, I wouldn’t want my son to feel that he has to “pay off his debt” because I brought him up, and I had the pleasure of doing so.

On the other hand, it is worth being grateful for some parental behaviours resulting from love. For having done more than dress, feed and educate. For example, for having taken a step that was very difficult for them, showing support for the child’s behaviour or decisions, even though it was completely contrary to their views or feelings: accepting the child’s non-heterosexual orientation or not interfering with risky passions, even though they had a lot of parental anxiety.

So gratitude is more likely to exist when you give something without expecting anything in return.

When you give because you feel such a need or because that is how you understand closeness in a relationship. And you take responsibility for that. Not when you’re devoting yourself to something just to be able to say, “I’m exhausting myself for you, and this is what you’re like?” Such gratitude is choking.

And now that I think about it, I don’t know if the word “give” is the word that should be associated with gratitude... Maybe the word “be” would be better. Be close to someone? In friendship? In parental contact? Of course, this also includes the process of giving, but it’s not the most important. Such giving does not presuppose reciprocity. I’m giving you myself, my time, because I chose to. And if I’ve had enough, it’s not you who’s responsible, it’s me or the world or this moment in my life.

So I’m not doing all this just so you get me a glass of water when I’m old.

It would be nice if you gave it to me because you want to, not because you’re so addicted to me by guilt that now for the next 20 years, you’re going to sacrifice your own time for me and serve me that glass of water every evening. Such excessive gratitude is also not a good thing, because it can restrain and damage relationships. If someone is grateful for the sake of being grateful, then you can get sick of it and start doubting the sincerity of their intent. It would make me wonder if this is some kind of reaction formation, that is, a mechanism in which aggressive and retaliatory feelings towards an important person arouse so much fear that they are exchanged for their opposite, for gratitude, for instance.

You personally have no problem experiencing gratitude?

Not with experiencing it, no. I’m discovering a great deal of gratitude in myself. However, I’m actually having trouble accepting gratitude. I immediately feel the need to reciprocate, sometimes disproportionately. And it’s been bothering me for the longest time.

When do you feel most grateful?

I guess when I feel like someone recognised my needs so well. Gave me what I really needed. Not because I asked them to, but because they saw it for themselves: they read my mood well, looked closely at what I liked, heard me and put an effort into answering my call. For example, they looked for a gift that suited me perfectly, and didn’t call to ask, “So, what would you like for your birthday?” I don’t require that kind of thing every day. I don’t need to be monitored so vigilantly all the time, but if it does happen, once I get someone’s real interest as a gift, then I melt in gratitude.

Agnieszka Jucewicz talks to Agnieszka Iwaszkiewicz  

• Agnieszka Iwaszkiewicz – psychotherapist and supervisor of the Polish Psychological Association (PTP). Associated with Laboratorium Psychoedukacji (Laboratory of Psychoeducation) in Warsaw, where she conducts individual and group psychotherapy.

The interview was published on wysokieobcasy.pl, 31 October 2020.
Originally published in "Wysokie Obcasy Extra" magazine, no. 2/2017.